Why AI Self-Regulation Won't Protect You (And Who It Protects)

Jeremy: Hey, this is Brobots. This is the podcast that tries to help you be a better human by being smarter about the way you use your technology. And I don't know about you, Jason, but the more I learn about this Donald Trump guy, the more I'm starting to think he may not be the best pr suited person to be the president of the United States.

Jason: Yeah, it's almost like there's been an entire group of people warning us that the sociopath might do sociopathic things.

Jeremy: All right, before anybody runs away, we're not gonna get super political, but we are gonna talk about super intelligence and the renaming of something else because somebody's got their panties in a twist. Donald Trump,

Jason: Yeah.

Jeremy: a number of things that we need to talk about surrounding him. One, this this agreement that he has brokered between all of the heads of the AI companies to try to do the right thing. We're gonna break that down. also this agreement was misspelled, which doesn't bode well for. Anybody who cares about grammar and some big changes to Claude and and Chat GPT that we're gonna try and get to. But this agreement, Jason, where all the all the bigwigs got together and said, Hey, we need to we need to be smart about this. We need to make a pact to not do bad things. Of course there's no legally binding ramifications for neglecting it or or completely ignoring it,

Jason: Yep.

Jeremy: but you know, i is this a step in the right direction?

Jason: if the direction that you're wanting to go is off of the cliff into oblivion, yeah, we're going the right way. All right.

Jeremy: We're gonna thalm and Louise this shit.

Jason: Yes, exactly. I cannot tell you how many times I've used that reference over the last few months about shit. Because it feels like that's what we're doing. Like so instead of actually putting forward something and legislatively where the federal government can intervene and say, no, you're not allowed to do this. Donald Trump has said we are not going to put any restrictions on AI. Not restrictions on building data centers, not restrictions on its use, no restrictions or guardrails. Instead, he said, we're going to let the corporations govern themselves.

Jeremy: The corporations, by the way, who don't want to govern themselves on this, they want their some of them are asking for this regulation and he's saying, No,

Jason: And

Jeremy: no, don't don't trust us dummies. You guys got this.

Jason: And it's worse than that because several of these companies are publicly traded companies, which means they have a fiduciary responsibility to earn as much money as possible. And that's a two-edged sword. Because one, AI doesn't make money. AI loses money. Anthropic,

Jeremy: Loads of money, right?

Jason: Anthropic is losing $5 billion a year. They're taking in a lot of money, but the net is negative $5 billion. And they want to do an IPO and they want to do an IPO for 500 to 1 valuation of revenue on negative profits. Like, this is the dumbest fucking fiscal decision that you could make. If somebody goes in and buys his anthropic stock, it's gonna tank and you're gonna lose your money. There, I there's no doubt. Like, yes, this thing will stay afloat. It's gonna keep pushing itself, but it's not gonna suddenly go, hmm, I'm worth a thousand to one. Because the valuation has to keep going up. And the only way that they can keep the valuation number moving in that direction is with extreme growth. And Donald Trump knows that the entire economy is artificially propped up right now by artificial intelligence. I should say the entire stock market is boosted by that. The economy itself is actually being damaged severely. Cost their goods are going up, electricity cost increases, transportation cost increases, because electricity cost increases. Like this is like a Russian nesting doll of shit. And every time you pull these things apart, you get to another little turd

Jeremy: Mm.

Jason: in between. And at some point, we're gonna get to the rabbit pellets and we're gonna be told they're jelly beans and we're supposed to eat them. Like, that's what's gonna fucking happen.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jason: and not only did he do that, this fucking dum-dum has decided that. It's not artificial intelligence, it's super intelligence. Like, no, dude, it's not. There is a thing There

Jeremy: That's already a thing. Superintelligence is already a thing, yeah.

Jason: is a thing called artificial superintelligence. And artificial superintelligence is when it exceeds a certain level. Artificial general intelligence is when it can do the shit that we can do without requiring us. It goes artificial intelligence, artificial general intelligence, artificial superintelligence. This guy's just like, I'm jumping right to super because he's too fucking stupid to know what it actually means. This is like, like AI right now is like a toddler. But it's a toddler with severe mental deficiencies, hyper strength, and access to nuclear weapons. Like, yeah, maybe we shouldn't do this.

Jeremy: What I love about that is that that Trump in many ways is like a toddler because he's just like w whenever he learns something that everyone else knows, i it's it's brand new. Nobody's ever heard of it. This is amazing.

Jason: Yeah.

Jeremy: And even this thing's like this this AI, this artificial intelligence, this is super. In fact, we should just call it super. Like he's just it's just whatever random train of thought becomes policy, becomes executive orders that are signed, and people just step in line and and start calling, you know Calling Lake Ontario Lake America. Like I just it's maddening. Yeah, it's the best.

Jason: Yeah, yeah. I mean Yeah. Well and South Park renaming itself to South America is like the most brilliant thing. Did you watch this week's episode yet?

Jeremy: No.

Jason: It's so delicious.

Jeremy: Okay.

Jason: they he Butters keeps talking about all these wil weeny billionaires building data centers in his backyard. And

Jeremy: no way.

Jason: his parents are pushing back on him. They feel guilty for making him a Lib Tard for getting him vaccinated. I should say the husband Berates the wife for getting him vaccinated because she said it turned him into a liptard. And

Jeremy: my god.

Jason: then cut to butters going into the backyard, yelling at the little weenie billionaires, literally little dicks, little cocks with googly eyes on them, like Trump's googly eye cock, and talking about how it is they have to do certain things. And one of the best lines in that is Not every billionaire needs to go on Joe Rogan. We should not do that. And there's this whole QA portion of it where it goes, should you buy a yacht? And some of the little weenies are like, no, that's bad. He goes, No, no, you should definitely do that. That's acceptable for billionaires. Should you buy a private jet? No. Yes, yes, you should. That's perfectly acceptable. Should you go on Joe Rogan and talk about peptides? Yes. No, you should not. Nobody cares about your opinions. Nobody, nobody cares. You weren't popular back when you were in high school, which is why you did all the things to make the money that you did. Becoming a billionaire didn't suddenly make you popular. It's like it was d it's delicious. It's delicious.

Jeremy: God. So good. So good.

Jason: Cause I'm one of these fucking nerds that has moved in this direction. I apparently I just wasn't nerdy enough to like push myself to sacrifice other people in a terrible, awful way. I mean, not to say that I haven't done that, because I have. In awful ways, and I'm a terrible person. I just haven't done it quite as much. Because

Jeremy: Ha ha.

Jason: unfortunately, this little weenie, you know, hundred thousand there doesn't fucking have all the tools required to actually, you know, pick a lane. Am I gonna be a good person or a shit person? Exactly. Partial,

Jeremy: One, you're not a complete you're not a complete sociopath. So you've got that going for you, which is nice.

Jason: I guess. Yeah.

Jeremy: so this this document that they've all signed, Trump's saying that it's it's it's almost like a constitution in a way. Except it's not. I mean I guess it is in that th they all signed a thing. So I that's that makes it sort of like a constitution in a way.

Jason: I guess if you think of it as a constitution, as a constitutional, which is a another word for taking

Jeremy: That's been closer. That's closer.

Jason: his shit, it will make some really good toilet paper. Actually probably not. It's probably awful toilet paper. And it was probably signed with autopen anyways.

Jeremy: right. That dreaded autopen because he can't do it.

Jason: Yes.

Jeremy: and then Zuckerberg, of course, weighing in on this, and this is my favorite part, said that this was created to assure the American public that their technology was trustworthy. And if you trust if you trust Zuckerberg and these clowns, you're you're playing the game wrong.

Jason: Yeah. I mean this is like like walking into a grocery store and seeing a big sign above the fruits and vegetables that say, Wash before eating and going home and popping that carrot directly in your mouth and wondering why it is you keep shitting yourself and throwing up. Like You were told just because the carrots there and you think it's just because you heard a billionaire on Joe Rogan talk about your biome in such a way that you need to put more unhealthy bacteria in you.

Jeremy: Right.

Jason: I mean, fuck, man. Like, I the people that are in charge are not the people with the knowledge. They're the people with the money and the power and the willingness to do whatever they have to do, aka. Fuck people over to get what they want. And what they

Jeremy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jason: want is your money. And more importantly, they want to own you. They want to own you, the data that's you, all those pieces that are you, because then they want to digitize that and take ownership of it and sell it. And then they don't need you. Well, no, they don't but

Jeremy: To back to you. They sell it back to you. They want to in yeah.

Jason: but yeah, but then they don't need you. I mean, the really scary part about all this is that this is all leading us towards what is essentially a a minima minimalist need for humans in the world. Because you don't need a bunch of us to be janitors and grow food and do construction. Like you can have the robots do all of this. And if that's the case, the work that we do as most people, where we actually do manual labor or have to actually figure things out with our, you know, squishy GPUs, will be obsolete. And our uniqueness, they think, will be obsolete. And the characteristics of us will be obsolete. And I won't get into all the reasons why that's not possible because of the ways of of randomness and physical interactions with things with our current systems and technologies. But there's new technologies coming online that will be surprisingly random in the way that they cut for things, and they're called quantum computers. And as quantum computing and AI begin to merge, the for lack of a better term, prediction machine in our heads and algorithms change. And because they change,

Jeremy: Say more.

Jason: what's that?

Jeremy: Say more.

Jason: Yeah. So quantum computers can go through and have a prediction mechanism. The whole point of them is to figure out the likelihood of an answer. And they don't just give you an answer, it gives you a whole range of them. So you narrow down the things that you're trying to predict. The big fear with them is that you're gonna have quantum computers being able to crack open encryption. So all the shit that you do on the internet is wrapped in security. And when you look at your browser and you open it up, instead of saying http colon forward slash forward slash, it says HTTPS. That S stands for secure. And what that means is they're putting an encryption layer around that information that theoretically nobody should be able to crack open and break. the problem is that what encryption really is for those things is basically multiplied together long prime numbers. And to go through the prime number sequence to understand those pieces to figure out which prime numbers are being used is surprisingly difficult. In fact, it's so difficult that if you take a regular classic computer, you know, like one of these, or the shit that's sitting on my desk, it can take like the length of the universe to crack 8k encryption. With quantum computing, The theory is that they can give you the numbers much, much quicker, narrow those things and isolate them down so that all that the classic computer has to do is have a much smaller subset to run through, not the infinite number of things that you can find and 8,000 bits of information. So, what companies are doing right now is they are trying to ensure that their data will be safe when these quantum computers come online. Because they know their security can be broken. So they're trying to do these things like post quantum cryptography and you do quantum save cryptography functions and

Jeremy: Right, a bunch of stuff I'm not smart enough to understand.

Jason: Right. Well, and not just you, like the vast majority of folks, it's not a matter of not being smart enough. It's just not you're just not willing to sit down in front of the computer for nine hours and do the fucking math because it fucking sucks. I mean, it's hard. Like

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: it's really hard. And I I do it because I actually have an interest in it and it feeds some form of mild autism, I'm sure that I have. And and I run with it. But the crazy thing is is that if you start using predictions in this kinds of ways to try to understand the peaks and the valleys of what are absolutely impossible answers and what are likely answers, you don't actually get the answer. What you get is the probabilistic outcome of what something will occur. And these things don't get the answer. Our heads, our brains guess. We

Jeremy: He's pointing at his head for you listeners. There you go. Mm-hmm.

Jason: guess what we think the likely outhood outcome will be, which is why we do things like ruminate on things when when people give us information and we don't have all the facts. And we start making up stories and telling ourselves stories because we're looking for these outcomes that might be likely. Which if you do a little mental health work, you're gonna discover that not only are they not likely, but you're actually creating yourself a story to look for the worst possible outcome. Well, if you want to replace humans, you have to put in the self-destructive side of things to get the chaos that actually makes the creativity that we produce work. If you're a machine. The likelihood that you're gonna look at the transaction side of things and go, it is irrational of me to sacrifice myself, others, blah blah di blah, to go and figure out an explanation, it won't do it. You know who will? The dumb dumb meat machines that think they might actually know what they're doing. If you add quantum computing into it, you can kind of get the same thing. But you gotta build in the self-sacrifice piece and you gotta build in the irrational hope piece. And I don't know if you guys know this or not, but computers aren't really great at irrational thoughts.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: They're great at rational, logical pieces. So, unless someone's gonna go and create a logical train that lets you go through and logically justify long term protracted, integrated relational self deception, you're not gonna get the same thing. So you take this as a composite. Take artificial intelligence as a thing that you're actually looking at. Well, no, it's not. Because just because

Jeremy: Super, it's super intelligence now.

Jason: that dipshit said it doesn't mean everyone else is. And I'm gonna keep calling it Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico until the day that I die, which might be by a fucking ICE agent or Trump bomb or some bullshit. That's not the point. The point is, is that if if if if there's any kind of hope. For how it is that we as a species are gonna make it through this, it's not gonna be help. It's not gonna be the help that we get from the people building the weapons and aiming them at us. Which that is what the AI folks are doing. And do I think they're all evil, maniacal sociopaths? I mean, fuck maybe. I don't really know, maybe, but. That's not that's not the issue either. The issue is that they have the ability to stop these things and control them. They could actually go in and turn them off and you start to compete, but they're not going to do that unless the entire group does this all at the same time. And you know what? The entire group's not going to do this the same time. Because we're giving people a major advantage that uses this technology in an unfettered way over their enemies. Because it's at this point, it's still a weapon. You can still point it towards someone. The problem that they don't realize is that it's more like a grenade. And if you pull the pin on a grenade and you hold the grenade too long, it will blow you up. And that's what we're gonna get to.

Jeremy: So that's I'm I'm trying to I'm trying to math the math because we started talking about how these things are losing money by the bucketful. How

Jason: Yeah. Yep.

Jeremy: does this just become a social program that we just accept that this doesn't make money but it gives us all the power? Like how how do the two how how does it exist and continue to to grow and take over when the funding isn't there for it to continue to grow and take over?

Jason: So it's already a social program. we are spending billions and billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars on providing infrastructure, electricity, permits, routing functions, everything else to build these data centers. Like they announced five hundred billion dollars in funding. The feds are using this. they've got entire data centers that are built out to do these things. They're pushing things into government approved cloud environments. It's already a social program.

Jeremy: So is the idea then I guess I I guess assuming best case scenario that you actually want humanity to continue and you want it to thrive and you want people to to continue being consumers in some way.

Jason: Are we are we talking about the Trump administration plan or the AI developers plan?

Jeremy: Right now all of it. Right. Like that that is those are the people in charge right now. So

Jason: Okay. Yeah. So it it's it's hard to put that into words because the Trump administration is too stupid to understand what's actually happening. And

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: at some level he goes, Good things are happening, so I'm gonna get away from this because he just thinks it's all fucking magic and

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: he's not gonna try to get in the way of it. The people that are building yeah.

Jeremy: So but I guess what I'm wondering is is do these people go throw all of the money at the things because ultimately these things take over and for the general public, they suddenly get a guaranteed basic income and they they get get to all go be poets and artists and everything's gonna be fine. Like are we willing to lose So but but I guess that's what I'm wondering is what's

Jason: Nobody actually nobody actually believes that. Nobody actually believes that.

Jeremy: like why are we okay with with throwing money at something that is not profitable? Like what's the end result?

Jason: Well, but who's we? Who's we in this?

Jeremy: As a species. As a species. Like why like why keep moving forward? If it's not making money and it's j

Jason: I think most of our species doesn't want to keep moving forward with this. I I think when you look at the popularity numbers, it's like 25%. 25% of the population thinks we should keep doing this. And

Jeremy: So why do we keep doing it?

Jason: well, because that 25% is currently in charge of everything. Or part of that 25% is currently in charge of anything. I would say 0.00001% is in charge of everything. And the remaining 24 in change. Are useful idiots.

Jeremy: So is it if the companies are losing money,

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy: why keep going? Like why keep doing it?

Jason: Well, because there's the perceived benefit and value of hoping these things actually turn into something that's more. You see, the idea that you actually have to make money to make money is a misnomer because money is not fucking real, it's made up. We have cryptocurrencies, we have an agreed upon thought and concept of what value actually is. And these guys all know this. This is not new. Economic theory suggests that all these things are entirely dependent upon public trust. And public trust. used to be a macro thing. Like you used to have to get everybody involved to believe that the trust would occur in order to keep people doing things and and using the currency and the way that it was set set up and move forward. We've just grown up in a time where we've always had this. There's never been a bartering system and we've just always said, well this is what the value of the dollar is so that's what I'm gonna go with. And we didn't question that. We just never really have. And because of that, like as a group, as a people, we Just kind of throw our hands up in the air and go, what are you gonna do? Because we feel like we're powerless. And unfortunately, when it comes to using this technology in a safe and responsible way, we kind of are. Like it's there, it's going to be used. We don't have the capacity to go in and turn it off as the other 75%. And it's worse than that because you would think that we could vote people in that would make these changes, but We're not smart enough to carry that all the way through. We

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: don't look at these things I mean, nobody's coming out as a single platform issue saying I oppose AI data centers and that is the one thing that I'm worried about. I think we'll get there. I think eventually that will happen, but it's gonna take a while and AI is not developing at the rate of elections. AI is developing and improving and evolving by this Picosecond Like this level of growth and understanding is not something that we know how to control, and our policy system is not set up to handle it. And this has been true for computing for a long time. And we've just basically punched the gas on it, and we've we're going from 15 miles per hour in a school zone to 50,000 miles per hour in a school zone, and we're wiping out all the children along the way, and nobody seems to. Give a fuck 'cause they think it's not their kids.

Jeremy: So in the end there the it's it's all a hope that this thing does create enough money and power in the end that it's worth the losses on the way to get there. That's that's the road we're on.

Jason: It's all irrational human logic.

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: The AI would not do this. The AI would be smart enough to go, hey, this seems like we shouldn't be going here. It just seems like

Jeremy: The math isn't mathing yet. Right.

Jason: something that's an unacceptable risk. Maybe we should slow things down. But we don't. We don't.

Jeremy: And so we're all fucked? I mean i i is that did is that where we land again?

Jason: I mean, that's true every time, right? Like the inevitable heat that the universe will occur, we

Jeremy: Right.

Jason: will all cease to exist at some point.

Jeremy: But we don't need to speed it up is what I'm saying. Like if if we can slow that down, if we can hit pause. I'm I'm for that.

Jason: Yeah, I don't know that I am. I mean, I'm just fucking right.

Jeremy: You're over it. You're just ready. Pull the plug already.

Jason: Like, I'm working too hard. Like, I I was at Quantum World Congress a couple weeks ago, and it was amazing. It was super cool. We saw all these different security problems of like harvesting all your data now to decrypt it in five years and the quantum computers ready to do it. And the people building quantum computers are like, I don't care about that. They're like This is not my primary concern. My primary concern is to make a quantum computer, because it's a a lot of them are just very smart research scientists, and this project is interesting and it has real value. They're not looking at how is this thing going to be turned into a weapon. And remember that movie Real Genius,

Jeremy: Mm-hmm.

Jason: where they were building the five-megabolt laser,

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah.

Jason: and they had somebody else make a mirror because Ken. Because they were gonna use it to vaporize a human target from space. And

Jeremy: Right.

Jason: When Val Kilmer finds out what they're doing, because Lazo Alifeld tells him, he's like crushed inside. And he figures out a way to go through and blow it up on the test bed harness that's out there running to try to do these tests. Well, quantum computer scientists, you're Val Kilmer in this. And there is a Laszlo Ollyfeld out there running around telling you what's gonna happen if you don't fucking interrupt it. And unfortunately, the idea that you're gonna be able to sneak on a military plane and put a sabotaging piece inside of it is not realistic. Like

Jeremy: Tom Cruise can do it. Come on.

Jason: Sure. Fine.

Jeremy: That guy can do anything.

Jason: Again, inevitable heat death, thank God.

Jeremy: All right. Well, we've ended up in in a terribly depressing and and sad place. But I think I think an honest one, I think it's one that there's a reason that The vast majority of us are concerned and scared about this stuff and I think these are the reasons why is that it it doesn't seem like it's gonna end well. But it's gonna write a lot of great

Jason: It feels honest

Jeremy: emails for me in the meantime.

Jason: it feels honest and authentic. And the reality is th there's a great line, I forgot the name of movie, but I think it's a Tom Cruise line. it's from Cocktail.

Jeremy: What a callback. Here we go.

Jason: everything everything ends badly. If it didn't, it wouldn't end.

Jeremy: Why would it end at all? That's right. Yep. That's that is a classic.

Jason: Yeah.

Jeremy: well I don't think this episode ended badly. I think I think we I think we landed the plane for the most part.

Jason: Haza!

Jeremy: Thanks so much for listening, or if or watching, if for some reason you like to look at our faces while we say these words, you can do that on YouTube and you can also follow us from our website, robots.me, which is where we will be back with another episode next Monday, unless I'm really lazy. thanks for listening. We'll see you Monday at robots.me.

Jason: Thanks everyone. Bye bye.